A short glossary of tech industry terms

John Ohno
3 min readOct 24, 2018

Agile: 1. an attribute of any team, no matter how dysfunctional; 2. [see SCRUM]

Altcoin: a slow spreadsheet [see Blockchain]

Big data: spreadsheets that won’t fit in excel

Big data science: a silicon valley themed porn parody of the Insane Clown Posse film “Big Money Hustlers”

Blockchain: [marketing slang] slow linked list

Business logic: whatever actions the software is intended to perform (as opposed to the much greater number of actions forced by poor design decisions)

CGI: 1. a shell script that prints HTML; 2. pixels

Cloud, the: a computer you rented from Amazon or Microsoft

Cloud computing: the pyramid-selling of cycles

Container: slow chroot jail

Containerization: a packaging method wherein a script is packaged with an entire linux distribution [see Electron]

Crypto: 1. (obs.) cryptography; 2. an altcoin

Data: spreadsheets

Data mining: using grep on your http logs

Data science: using grep on your http logs with a minor in statistics

Deep learning: brute force statistical modeling, performed by non-staticians, using third party code on rented computers [see Cloud, Cloud computing, Data]

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net